In this latest trip to China, the first company I visited was Pimax. And when I say “first company”, I mean it: they have come to the airport to bring me directly to their headquarters in Shanghai! In their venue, I was able to visit their offices, try the latest iteration of the Pimax Crystal Super, and also put my hands on some early prototypes of the Pimax Dream Air. Do you want to hear my impressions about everything? Of course you want, so keep reading!
[Disclaimer: No, Pimax has not paid for my trip, nor my hotel. But they offered me some quick lunch, I guess worth 8 euros. I have a much higher price to be corrupted, so trust me that what I’m going to write is just an honest opinion.]
Pimax offices
I’ve been received at the airport by Jaap (the PR everywhere-guy of Pimax), who very kindly brought me to the headquarters of Pimax. I would also have liked to visit the factory, but I’ve been told it’s like 3 hours by car from Shanghai, and after a trip that lasted more than 20 hours from China to Italy, I would have preferred to die instead of having another trip of 3 hours, so I may go there another time.
I’ve been able to visit the offices of Pimax, though, and it was an interesting tour anyway. It’s always fascinating to visit hardware companies, and seeing people having living labs with dozens of parts of headsets on their desks because they are doing some R&D or some testing. Unluckily, I could not take pictures (there is sensitive information there), but they still made me see some curious things that I’ll mention in the remainder of this article.
The gut feeling that I had by speaking with Jaap, Martin, Daisy, and the other people there is that Pimax may have all the problems we all know, like the fact that they are launching a new headset every 72 hours, but it is also a company that is trying to improve. Jaap was very open to answer all my questions, even the one about the many headsets they have (he repeated what he said in a video on Youtube, that is that having different product lines launched in different moments helps also in keeping the factory always at the same level of busyness); the headset that I’ve tried has improved a lot since my tests at CES; the communication of the company has improved a lot in the last couple of years.
I had no “scam vibes” while being there. Yes, they are messy, yes, they launch too many devices, yes, their products are not perfect. But they are also working hard, and they are trying to fix every problem the community tells them about. For instance, I’ve been shown people doing QA on many headsets because recently there were complaints about defective units, so Pimax has intensified the QA operations on the devices before shipping them. I always appreciate those who try to improve, so I have to praise them for the right attitude they have. There is still a long road to go, but the direction is the right one.
Pimax Crystal Super
After my tests at CES, I’ve been able to go hands-on again with the Pimax Crystal Super and see if the device has gotten any better. As you can guess from what I’ve said in the last paragraph, it has actually improved.
Design and comfort
These are some pictures I’ve shot of the headset from all possible directions.
The headset is bulky and has the classic Pimax look, with the colored V on the front plate. Its fit has changed from my previous tests at CES. This time there was a top strap, which helped to make the headset feel more stable and balanced on my head, but both the eye-relief mechanism and the knob to regulate the weight on the forehead disappeared. The result is that the headset is easier to wear, but its fit is less customizable, so some people may not be happy about that.
For my head, the sensation I had is more or less the same as I had at CES: especially after Jaap adjusted my fit, the headset felt quite good on my head, and its weight also had an okay-ish balance, even if it still felt slightly more front-heavy than I wanted. But the real problem is still the same I flagged at CES: the headset is heavy in general. I thought it was even more than 1 kilo, but Jaap told me it is actually less than that. But you can feel the weight on the head and the neck, and especially if you rotate your head, you feel the momentum that tries to get the head spinning out of your neck. To make things worse, the cable, which is big as well, also sometimes get stuck in a certain direction, making the headset feel imbalanced in that direction.
This is a headset mostly suited for simmers, which are people who do not have to move their head much, so for them this device is fine. But if you want to play a game that requires quick and fast head movement, this head may not be ideal for you. As usual with current VR headsets, there are compromises to be made, and Pimax decided to sacrifice weight to have higher resolution and FOV.
Visuals
At CES, I commented about the visuals of the Pimax Crystal Super by saying that they were great but showed serious problems of warping and washed-out colors. Well, the problems seem to have been solved. The headset has a very crisp resolution and a wide field of view that provides a good immersion inside the virtual world you are experiencing. The visuals are simply great and the mission of the “Super” of providing a superior experience for those who want the best immersion is satisfied. The warping problem is mostly solved, and I didn’t even notice it in the first demo, while I was still able to slightly spot it when trying Half-Life: Alyx. It is now very subtle and does not ruin the whole experience like it did four months ago. Now you just notice that there is some form of barrel distortion when you are close to something whose lines should be perfectly straight, like a square column. Also, when looking in a very specific direction, I could sometimes see a little duplication of a portion of the visuals: it was a very specific problem for a very specific and uncomfortable pose of my eyes, but I still have to report it.
As for the colors, they also looked quite vivid, and the black levels were much less grey than they used to be. Thanks to some dimming technology, now the blacks are somewhere in the middle between the blacks of an LCD display and the ones of an OLED display. At least they seem black and not grey, which is already a great thing.
Talking about distortions, I still noticed both spherical and chromatic aberrations when looking at the periphery of the vision. And there was also a very subtle chromatic aberration on the edges of visual elements. For instance, if you have a black straight line in a white space, if you look very closely at the black line, you notice that there is a very small halo of separating colors from it. It’s almost unnoticeable in most scenarios, but if you pay very close attention, you can notice it.
Still, if you look straight in front of you, this headset can provide a clarity which is rare to find in other devices.
Tracking
I was testing the device with inside-out tracking, and I found that the tracking was working pretty well, but it was also kinda choppy. It was not smooth, but like moving in a laggy way. I have been able to speak with the engineer working on the tracking, and he told me that, actually, they have already partially solved the issue and that it should be fully solved in a few weeks. I wanted to try the current status of tracking, with the partial solution already implemented, so he made me try a headset directly in the lab: I can confirm that the tracking of the version he was working on was like night and day with the one of the demo unit that I tried: the tracking was smooth… not perfect, but smooth. This means that the team has solved the problem for real.
A little curiosity that you may like: to do automatic tests of the tracking system for the rotation of the headset, Pimax engineers are using a cheap automatic rotating fan that makes the headset go left and right for many hours. Maybe Meta has some complex machinery worth millions to do that, while at Pimax, they are using a fan worth maybe 2 euros, and still obtaining good results. I loved this hacky and affordable solution! This is a nerd startup mentality at work. Watch the video below to see what I am talking about.
Controllers
Regarding the controllers, I can copy-paste what I wrote at CES about them, because there is nothing much to say about them:
The controllers of the device looked a bit like the controllers of the Quest 2, with the classical two buttons, thumbstick, grip button, trigger button, menu button, and an additional Pimax button. They had a tracking ring. The experience used for the demo was not made to test the controllers, so I can just say that they were normal controllers, like there are many in the VR space. Nothing bad or good to talk about here.
Final considerations
I was able to test the Pimax Crystal Super only for like 20 minutes, so I can not express a reliable opinion about it. But my first impressions on this new iteration have been positive. The headset is crisp, has bright colors, and a good FOV. The company is continuously improving it, and this is a good sign for people who are going to buy it now. It is not perfect, though: it is very heavy, has some visual distortion issues, and the tracking needs an update. But if your main purpose is doing sim games, most of these problems do not matter to you, so this may be a good headset to buy… provided that you have the budget for it (it costs around $1700).
Hands-on Pimax Dream Air prototypes
I was not able to try the Pimax Dream Air or the Pimax Dream Air SE because the review units were not in Shanghai anymore when I landed in the city. But I’ve been shown some early prototypes and 3D prints of it. What I can say by putting these early versions on my head is that the headset is very small and lightweight. It is much lighter than I imagined, so if this is the final feeling, it is impressive how comfortable it is to wear. Unluckily, I don’t have a BigScreen Beyond to make a comparison, but I can say that it was for sure very small.
In the prototype, the lenses of the device could be moved left and right asymmetrically: so you could set up the IPD while also taking care of the specific position of both your eyes.
Jaap connected one of these early prototypes to his phone via its USB-C cable, and the headset was able to somehow show me the content of his phone. It was impressive to me that the phone could power a VR headset… yeah, I know that we had the Gear VR, but since then, we haven’t had many mobile-connected VR headsets.
We also made a little stupid test, and I took the phone, with the camera app open, and put it in front of the headset, and used it to do some kind of passthrough MR and walk around the corridor like this. I don’t know why I did it, but it seemed to me something cool to do at that moment. And the fact that I didn’t die is already a good sign, I think.
Unluckily, this is the best I could try of the Pimax Dream Air: I know it is not much, so I’m trying to see if I can get a better taste of it before I leave China. Fingers crossed…
And that’s it for my experience at the Pimax headquarters! I promised you that I would tell you as much as I could about my experience in China, and as you can see, I’m keeping my promise! If you have any questions, feel free to comment on this article or my social media posts. And if you want to become a Patron to support my expenses in doing my crazy trips around the world, this is the link to donate… thank you!